The Adobe Type Team blog

Posts in Category "Adobe Type in Use"

We’re pleased to announce a new feature on the Adobe Type blog: Adobe Type in Use. This international typographic feast focuses on creatives doing great work with great faces from the Adobe library. Our team and our friends in the type community have been pounding the pavement, virtually, in search of exceptional projects to share, and we’ve discovered some real gems. We’re particularly excited about kicking off this series with a focus on Source Sans, Adobe’s first open source type family.

Designed by type team member Paul D. Hunt, under the direction of Robert Slimbach, Source Sans has been widely adopted since it was released in August 2012. It’s incredible seeing so many designers using Source Sans for a wide range of clients and causes. We’re quite fond of these worthy projects for Relay Foods, Weathertron, and L’Ecole du Bayon, and we think you’ll like them, too.

Relay Foods: Making eating well easy.Relay Foods, based in Charlottesville, Virginia, is an online grocer with a focus on sustainable foods and local producers. Currently operating in a handful of upper East Coast markets, including Baltimore, Maryland, Washington, DC, and Richmond, Virginia, Relay offers a clean, easy-to-use shopping interface. Customers can choose from products procured from local stores, restaurants, and farms, and have the option of home delivery or picking up their orders at readily accessible distribution spots in their cities.

The company’s stated aim is “to make eating quality, healthy, and sustainable food simple.” In developing a mission-friendly tone for the website and everything from delivery trucks to tees, Greenville, South Carolina’s Matthew Smith, Chief Creative Officer for Relay, combined Source Sans with Rooney, Parsley Script, and DIN Condensed.

“We knew we wanted a sans face that was tighter and less formal and gothic than the catch-all Helvetica. Open Sans is a great typeface, but a little more ‘open’ than we were looking for,” Matthew said. “When I first saw Source Sans blown up black and strong above a Rooney Regular subtitle, I knew we had the right balance. It’s a great readable face.”

Matthew said Source Sans is particularly well suited to Relay’s marketing because it has “warmth in the letterforms without being sissy; strength without being macho. [It’s a] great balance for a typeface that needs to convey simplicity as a service—our core motto.”

“People often ask what faces we’re using and why we’ve paired the fonts the way we have,” Matthew said. “My own feedback is that it’s growing, and it’ll be refined more and more as we move along in the product.”

About the Type

Typblography uses Adobe Clean, a typeface designed by Robert Slimbach for Adobe's exclusive use, which is delivered to this blog via Typekit, Adobe's font subscription service.

This blog looks best with ClearType turned on, if using Microsoft Windows. If the text looks jagged or rough, please check your Windows settings to ensure that ClearType is turned on. For more details, see the Typblography09/28/2010 and 10/13/2010 posts on this topic.